After A-Jad

Elections attract their share of wide-eyed idealists, and, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad nearing the end of his second term as Iran’s President, politicians are jostling to take his place. Most of the possible contenders are hard-liners of one sort or another. But Hooshang Amirahmadi, a moderate, sixty-five-year-old public-policy professor at Rutgers who has dual U.S.-Iranian citizenship, won’t be deterred.

Amirahmadi was out on the stump one wet evening last week in Greenwich Village. “Think of the Islamic Republic as a bus on cruise control,” he told a crowd of people gathered at the Kimmel Center, at New York University. Amirahmadi is a short man with neatly parted hair and John Dewey spectacles. He wore a gray suit with a white pocket square. “Unless someone jumps on and takes control of the steering wheel, that bus could end up off the cliff,” he said. He described Iran’s three greatest challenges: political backbiting, conflict with the United States, and a struggling economy. “In short, Iran needs a President who is a bridge builder, a peacemaker, and an economic manager,” he said. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have spent thirty years of my life doing just that!” The audience burst into applause.

Dana Byrd, a tall African-American man with a shaved head and a hoop earring, who is Amirahmadi’s bodyguard, scanned the room. When he’s not guarding the professor, he is a musician and moonlights as a bouncer. He’s one of several campaign accoutrements that Amirahmadi has acquired since his last shot at the Presidency, in 2005. The Guardian Council, which plays the role of Supreme Court and superdelegate, disqualified him, and Ahmadinejad won. (After the fact, Amirahmadi dismissed Ahmadinejad, who is not known for his fashion sense, as a man who “dresses extremely badly.”) Amirahmadi, who came to the U.S. thirty-nine years ago, insists that this attempt will be serious. His Web site, which shows photographs of him with Bill and Hillary Clinton and Chuck Hagel, has links for donations and volunteers. And he has hired a former CBS News staffer, Kayvon Afshari, to focus on branding and social media. “On Facebook, we had only three hundred and thirty likes, but that increased by thirty or forty since I took over, last week,” Afshari said.

Facebook likes probably won’t sway the Guardian Council. But a little pandering might. Amirahmadi told the crowd that the 1979 Iranian revolution was “the most popular and peaceful revolution in human history,” and he ridiculed American policy toward Iran. “On the table there is no carrot anymore,” he said. “Only a huge pile of sticks.” Then he added, “The Islamic Republic will never come to its knees because of sanctions!”

Asked how he expected to run a campaign from the United States, Amirahmadi replied, “This is an Internet society, a satellite society. Believe it or not, when I talk to the media ten million people watch me in Iran.”

Sandy Frucher, the vice-chairman of Nasdaq, was sitting in the front row. “What gives you any hope at all that you will be chosen?” he asked.

Amirahmadi quickly dispelled the notion that he threatened the clerical regime: “I am not a revolutionary. I am not a fighter. I am a university professor.” Earlier, he had said, “I really want to be the Deng Xiaoping of Iran, because Deng Xiaoping is a man who changed China without changing the system.”

“Deng Xiaoping was a person of the system,” Frucher said. “You’re an outsider.”

Amirahmadi recalled a visit to the palace of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in the nineteen-eighties, when Khamenei was President. “I may be a little outside, but in many ways I am ‘in.’ And I’m in fact a better ‘in,’ in that sense, than many of the ‘in’ people are.”

When the crowd dispersed, Amirahmadi sipped tea and talked about his plans. He had begun to think about a cabinet (“technocratic, meritocratic”) but would not name names. He cited Abraham Lincoln as a role model (he’d recently watched the Spielberg movie) and Ahmad Qavam, a former Iranian prime minister. While describing how Qavam once outwitted Stalin, in the nineteen-forties, Amirahmadi became so worked up that he spilled his tea. He straightened his cup and went on to tout his ground game. He claimed that an “extensive network of volunteers” was waiting to be activated. “They are sort of guerrilla cells,” he added, visibly tickled by the sound of intrigue. ♦

Growing up in an apocalyptic cult wasn’t nearly as hard as leaving it.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.